Claude Shannon established the foundation for the discipline now known as "multi-user information theory" in his pioneering paper "Two-way Communication Channels" in 1961 and later  Norman Abramson published his paper “The Aloha System – Another Alternative for Computer Communications” in 1970 which introduced the concept of multiple access using a shared commonchannel. After more than 40 years of study, numerous elegant theories and algorithms have beendeveloped for multiple access techniques.

In recent years, broadband wireless data networks (for instance, IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi, IEEE802.16 WiMAX) are driving the development of the telecommunication industry and Beyond 3G(B3G) wireless systems are expected to provide a variety of multimedia services in a wide range of wireless and mobile environments. To use the scarce bandwidth resource of the wireless channel, it isnecessary to design channel access control techniques for a large population of users (potentiallyhundreds of mobile stations).

The aim of these collected articles is to give an overview of the state-of-the-art results inmulti-user communications theory, multiple access techniques, queuing theory and standardizationactivities in areas mostly related to PHY and MAC layer protocols for contemporary wirelessnetworks and their interactions.